This is why young Texans can't find Pettus or the Republican Party on a map

I was driving to Pettus to see my daughter play in a volleyball tournament when she called from the school bus.

"Dad, where's Pettus? We can't find it on the map."

A member of Youth Network Out Together, or YNOT, stamped their Pride-themed handprint on a poster ...more

A member of Youth Network Out Together, or YNOT, stamped their Pride-themed handprint on a poster board in preparation for the 2016 Pride Downtown Corpus Christi on May 20, 2017. YNOT is a program of the Coastal Bend Wellness Foundation. Its goal is to reduce health disparities between LGBTQIA+ youth and their straight counterparts.

Beatriz Alvarado/Caller-Times

"You've been to Pettus," I said. "It has Mom's favorite Dairy Queen. It's on the way to Kenedy. Google it."

"We did. We can't find it."

I had a hunch as to why.

"Spell 'Pettus,'" I said.

"P-e-r-e-z."

And right there was a lesson in how times have changed since I was a boy. This was about six years ago. All of the girls on that bus assumed that Pettus was "Perez." All heard the double "t" in Pettus and assumed it was the rolled "r" in Perez.

It never would have occurred to my generation because we pronounced Perez "PAIR-ez" or "Puh-REZ." South Texas Hispanic culture, while all around us, hadn't asserted itself as strongly as it does now.

That was partly because non-Hispanics still outnumbered Hispanics in South Texas when I was growing up, but also because we weren't predisposed to give their culture the respect it deserved then and commands now. My daughter's generation didn't grow up with our baggage. Did I mention what a dazzling folklorico dancer she was in elementary and middle school?

Fast-forward to last year's Buc Days parade. I drove my then-20-year-old daughter and her friend as near as we could get to the parade's starting point at Buc Stadium. They were among the marchers with the Pride float.

Ever a student of life, I asked her friend if the LGBT community had a label for friends like my daughter who are not gay but who volunteer to do things like march in a Pride t-shirt. Yes, he said, she is an "ally."

In the world that existed when I was my daughter's age, no way I'd have been an ally, marching like she did. People might have thought I was gay. The horror!

During the parade my daughter saw one of the moms from her old middle school. She saw a spark of recognition, then a confused frown as the t-shirt's meaning apparently dawned on the woman. This only amused my daughter. Her effortless embrace, respect and support of LGBT is another of those generational differences, like her generation's familiarity and ease with things Hispanic.

These two events in her life occurred to me as I perused an excellent column by Ross Ramsey of Texas Tribune about the Texas Republican Party's decision not to allow the Log Cabin Republicans a booth at the state convention. This anti-LGBT stance is neither new nor out of character with the party platform, as Ramsey pointed out. But it's woefully out of touch with my daughter's generation. She's 21 now and has been voting awhile.

To say that her age group overwhelmingly supports same-sex marriage, while true, is nuanced incorrectly. To them, the notion that government could prevent it is so arcane that having to clarify their position is weird.

In Texas, this younger generation also is mostly Hispanic, especially in South Texas. In his column, Ramsey noted that the Texas GOP's top two issues that affect Hispanics directly are immigration and border security.

Whether the Texas GOP cares to admit it or not, the policies it has implemented in relation to these two inseparable issues are anti-Hispanic. The so-called sanctuary cities law puts every brown-skinned Texan whose appearance suggests Hispanic at risk of harassment by law enforcement. And the expensive expansion of the DPS presence in border counties in the name of border security para-militarizes an overwhelmingly Hispanic region in an unfriendly way.

"The reality is," Ramsey wrote, "Republicans are old."

I'm sure my daughter will become more conservative with advancing age. But the conservatism in her future won't be remotely what the Texas Republican Party is now. If the Republicans want to reach my daughter's generation — i.e., survive — they'll have to do more than change their message. They'll have to evolve, as I have tried my best to evolve. Because about the only thing I can see that's better about my generation than my daughter's is our ability to find Pettus on a map.

Tom Whitehurst Jr.

Tom Whitehurst Jr.

Caller-Times

Contact Tom Whitehurst Jr. at tom.whitehurst@caller.com or 361-886-3619. Join him on Twitter @WhitehurstJr.